Understanding Gish Jen
Jennifer Ann Ho
Jennifer Ann Ho introduces readers to a “typical American” writer, Gish Jen, the author
of four novels, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World
and Town; a collection of short stories, Who’s Irish?; and a collection of lectures, Tiger
Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Jen writes with an engaging, sardonic,
and imaginative voice illuminating themes common to the American experience:
immigration, assimilation, individualism, the freedom to choose one’s path in life, and
the complicated relationships that we have with our families and our communities. A
second-generation Chinese American, Jen is widely recognized as an important American literary voice, at once accessible, philosophical, and thought-provoking. In addition
to her novels, she has published widely in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Atlantic
Monthly, and Yale Review.
Ho traces the evolution of Jen’s career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice. In the process she shows why Jen’s observations about life in the United
States, though revealed through the perspectives of her Asian American and Asian immigrant characters, resonate with a variety of audiences who find themselves reflected
in Jen’s accounts of love, grief, desire, disappointment, and the general domestic
experiences that shape all our lives.
Following a brief biographical sketch, Ho examines Jen’s major works, showing how
she traces the transformation of immigrant dreams into mundane life, explores the limits of self-identification, and characterizes problems of cross-national communication
alongside the universal problems of aging and generational conflict. A final chapter
examines her essays and concerns and stature as a public intellectual, and detailed
primary and secondary bibliographies provide a valuable point of departure for both
teaching and future scholarship.
Understanding Contemporary American Literature • Linda Wagner-Martin, series editor
November 2015, 144 pages
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Jennifer Ann Ho, an associate professor of English and comparative
literature at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaches courses
in Asian American literature, multiethnic American literature, and contemporary American literature. She is the
author of Consumption and Identity in
Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels
and Racial Ambiguity in Asian American
Culture and has published articles in
Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian
American Studies, and Amerasia Journal,
among others.
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